Top News StoriesA Strategic Look at SharePoint: Economics, Information & People (CMSWire)Like it or not, SharePoint continues to be a central topic of discussion. It’s a platform everyone integrates with at the same time criticizes and competes with. Love it or hate it, if SharePoint is inside your organization, it’s also safe to assume it’s not going anywhere anytime soon. In fact, SharePoint continues to grow in organizations of all sizes, from document collaboration and intranet publishing, to an increasing focus on business process workflows, internet and extranets. Today, many organizations are now in flight with their 2010 upgrades, replacing other portals and ECM applications, and even embracing social computing all on SharePoint.

Salesforce.com Unveils the Social Enterprise (CRM.com)Salesforce.com today used its user ninth annual user conference to unveil its vision for the social enterprise, leveraging social, mobile, and open cloud technologies to revolutionize companies’ relationships with their customers. In front of a crowd of 45,000 registered attendees and 35,000 online attendees from 60 countries, Salesforce.com chairman and CEO Marc Benioff announced several new products and services, including Chatter Now, Chatter Approvals, Chatter Customer Groups, Chatter Service, and Data.com. In addition, bringing mobile apps to the social enterprise, touch.salesforce.com will leverage HTML5 to deliver an optimized experience on touch devices for all Salesforce and native Force.com apps. Other launches included Heroku for Java, Chatter Connect, and Database.com.

Clouds Hang Over Microsoft Office, SharePoint 2010 Launch (PCWorld)Microsoft has launched the newest versions of its Microsoft Office and Microsoft SharePoint software packages. Microsoft Business Division president Stephen Elop spoke before a packed studio at the famed NBC Studio 8H at 30 Rockefeller Plaza in New York, the room where "Saturday Night Live" is broadcast. It was one of many launches the company is holding worldwide for the new products.

Microsoft Windows Azure: Why I Still Haven't Tried It (DevProConnections)Within the next two months I'm hoping to launch a product that requires scalable, redundant, and commoditized hosting for a number of geographically distributed nodes. As of today, I don't think I'll be using Microsoft Windows Azure to host my solution. Windows Azure and the Cloud: After looking around at various cloud-hosting options for my solution, I've considered the notion of deploying my solution on either a Platform as a Service (PaaS) cloud or going a bit deeper down the "stack" and using an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), where I'll be looking for full-blown virtual machine (VM) cloud hosting.

Microsoft's IE Will Drop Under 50% Share By Mid-2012 (CIO)Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) will lose its place as the majority browser next summer, according to statistics published today by Web metrics company Net Applications. If the pace of IE's decline over the last 12 months continues, IE will drop under the 50% mark in June 2012. In August, IE lost about seven-tenths of a percentage point in usage share, falling to 55.3%, a new low for the once-dominant browser. In the last year, IE has dropped 6.9 points.

Windows Phone 7: Honorable Mention or Eventual Winner? (Visual Studio Magazine)In just a couple of months, Windows Phone 7 will have its first birthday, and its prognosis for success seems to have polarized the tech world. Some pundits and luminaries in the industry have pronounced Windows Phone 7 dead, or nearly so; its market share is relatively small, and its presence in carriers' retail stores is spotty at best. Meanwhile, Microsoft persists in its push to gain smartphone market share, two major analyst firms have projected that Windows Phone will be No. 2 in the market by 2015, and the quantity and quality of apps for the platform is growing.

Around the BlogosphereSharePoint Server 2010 - 10 Steps to Disaster Recovery (The SharePoint Guys)This article aims to help anyone creating a Disaster Recovery (DR) design/strategy for SharePoint Server 2010. This advice will be based on my experience of designing a DR model and after conversations with experts such as Spencer Harbar, Microsoft IT and SharePoint Online.

SharePoint Sprawl, but with Good Intentions (AIIM)I was born and raised in northern California, and have seen some dramatic changes to the state in the past 40 years. Like many other parts of the country (and in other population centers around the world), California has been in a constant state of growth, with houses and shopping centers and gas stations popping up in every direction, with seemingly little thought going into urban planning. While some cities attempted to control that spread, considering the impacts to environment, commutes, and culture, my guess is that these attempts happen a lot less frequently than you'd expect. Much of the time, it is quicker (and cheaper) to build out new rather than repurpose the old. And in our current economic climate, many municipalities are now having to deal with their short-sighted planning decisions.

Automatic Tagging Based from a Folder: How to Get Your Users to Eat their Vegetables (Without them knowing it) (EndUserSharePoint)The Debate: The health benefits of including vegetables as part of a healthy diet are well documented. Eating vegetables may help reduce the risk of heart disease, lower blood pressure, etc. However, there are some people who refuse to eat their vegetables, regardless of the benefits. Tagging your content in SharePoint is like eating your vegetables – it’s good for you! However, just like with vegetables, there are many end users who do not like (or want) to have to tag their content. They prefer to use good old-fashioned folders. NothingbutSharePoint.com contains many articles on the topic of folders vs. tags (see: SharePoint Folders vs. Metadata, Folders in doc libraries are metadata cries for help, SharePoint: Convert Folder Structures to Metadata, and Folders and Metadata Rehashed).

Moving a Custom Domain to Office 365 (Get the Point)Recently, I helped a small business get started with Office 365. The business owner had an existing website, so a lot of work needed to be done to switch from the old hosting service to Office 365. Much of the work went smoothly. But when it came to moving the business owner’s domain name to Office 365, that was, well…. a bit of a challenge. At first, it seemed like a straightforward task, but ultimately it involved working with multiple parties who had different processes and expectations.

A Dummies’ Guide to SharePoint and jQuery–A Real World Example (The SharePoint Hillbilly)And I thought, here’s a great example where you could use jQuery and SharePoint in the wild. With jQuery you could easily hide the “Upload Multiple Files…” link… well.. I assumed you could.. I mean how hard could it be? Keep in mind that ANYTHING you see on the page that is not Flash, Silverlight, or an Active X control can be manipulated with jQuery. There’s probably a couple of other things that can’t be modified, but I don’t know what they are off the top of my head… generally, it can be manipulated.

Around Bamboo NationYes, It's Time for a SharePoint App Store (The Bamboo Team Blog)I enjoyed a well-considered article from Global 360's Derek Weeks today on CMS Wire. Derek asks, "Is it Time for a SharePoint App Store?" It's a great question, and one that many of us have been asking for years, with only one obvious answer: "Yes!" But perhaps the more important question is, "Who can deliver it?" Derek says, "As millions gained access to SharePoint from IT organizations that deployed it without an explicit strategy, its out-of-the-box experience often left them disappointed." In my opinion that statement is obvious and not even remotely controversial. It reminds me of some old creative concepts I had developed for Bamboo that never quite made it to market:

Deploying Workflows as 'System Account'? Just Say 'NO!' (The Bamboo Team Blog)Today I found myself scratching my head. I was playing around with workflows (creating out-of-the-box SharePoint Workflows in SharePoint Designer 2010, as well as creating workflows with our own Bamboo Workflow Conductor). I was attempting to build a simple workflow to update a column when a new item is created. I initially built it using the option to manually initiate the workflow to test the logic and make sure the right value was updating. It did, which was great. Next, I switched the initiation to automatically run on item creation. Published the workflow and waited.... and waited... and waited some more, but the workflow never even started. Completely flummoxed, I did some searching online.

SharePoint Application Administrator - Phoenix, AZA SharePoint application developer will design and develop business solutions using the latest technologies in SharePoint 2010 with Microsoft .Net framework. A SharePoint developer will be part of a software development Scrum team focused on delivering content and functionality within the SharePoint platform. Utilize SharePoint 2010 for internal and external facing applications that integrate with custom web services and back end data sources. Develop customizations for branded solutions including templates, master page layouts, CSS style definitions, templates, and themes. Mentor and train Application developers on best practices and standards when developing in SharePoint.

Microsoft UpdatesPlan for SharePoint Workspace 2010 (TechNet)When you plan a Microsoft SharePoint Workspace 2010 deployment, consider your organization’s needs and objectives, especially in the context of the deployment options that are discussed here. The following references may also be helpful: For information about how to deploy SharePoint Workspace 2010 after planning your objectives, see Configure and customize SharePoint Workspace 2010. For information about how to deploy SharePoint Workspace 2010 for a Microsoft Groove Server-managed environment, see Deployment for Groove Server 2010.